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The Times picks on The Times; talking cops and cops who don’t talk

(I’ve been working on this post for several days, but the fire keeps sucking me back in. Now, at 11:49 at night, maybe I can escape flame coverage for 10 minutes and finish this…)

One of the things I dig about our downtown friends is Outside the Tent, where they invite local authors to rag on their coverage. I think it takes some guts to use your own pages to let people say you suck.

The most recent critic to weigh in is Robert CJ Parry, whom you may remember from a previous post here. I’ve chatted with him numerous times, and, a few months ago, we enjoyed a delightful conversation over hot cereal at his Westwood office (he chose the oatmeal, I opted for cream of wheat. I got the sense he was judging me for my choice, but I didn’t hold it against him). We seem to have completely opposite political viewpoints, but I respect him as a smart dude.

In his Times takedown, Parry argues that the paper focuses too much on negative cops stories at the expense of positive ones. He brings up some good, valid examples that lend credence to his position and tells me that the Times’ Op-Ed folks were careful and thorough in their fact-checking.

[Tuesday, 11:56 p.m. edit… I’ve been trying to figure out how to critique this for two days now, but everything I wrote sounded stupid, so I’m just going to close here and let you make your own judgments…. actually, come to think of it, I will say something that’s sort of related….]

Let’s stipulate that what Mr. Parry says is true and that the Times favors negative coverage and neglects the heroic ones. I don’t know their relationship with the cops they cover or their agenda, so I can’t get into that too much of my own. But I will say this: cops (and all law enforcement agencies, for that matter) often don’t help things by the way they deal with the media.

Whenever I end up on a crime story, I’ve found there are two sorts of cops: they’re either ridiculously helpful or the extreme opposite. You get a good relationship with one and they’ll help you out on a story, give you fair access and allow you to tell their side of the story. The other sort spend all their time complaining about how they don’t like the media and how some reporter gave them a hard time in 1982 and how we just don’t understand them.

Well, guys, I’m sorry for whoever was rude to you, especially if it was me. And I realize there’s often things you can’t talk about because of your investigations or because you’re busy chasing men with guns. Hey, that’s cool, I can respect that. But y’all oughtta realize that we’ve got a job to do that’s very similar to yours: to serve and inform the public. If we’re going to do that, we need your help and your honesty. If you offer that up, you’re much more likely to get an accurate, fair story about whatever you’re working on.

That’s my soapbox, however, not Mr. Parry’s. I hope they’re kind of related. Whatever. It’s late. Let me know what you think of his piece and have a lovely evening.

2 thoughts on “The Times picks on The Times; talking cops and cops who don’t talk”

You serve and inform the public….Well sometimes reporters only serve themselves. You dont have all the facts and frankly you print false statements and half truths. So excuse me if i dont go out of my way to give you all the information you want. Do your job and investigate it. Half the time you write ant-cop articles and side with people who hate cops. Why would we want to go out of our way to give you a statement and HELP you out.